Resident Evil 3

There's something to say about brevity. A game that knows how long it should stick around. Resident Evil 3 does that perfectly. You can beat the game in 6 hours if you sort of tool around or 2 hours if you try to do a speedrun. 

I was very excited when the Resident Evil 3 remake was announced. Capcom did us well with the Resident Evil 2 remake, so I had every expectation that running through the streets of Racoon City with new controls and updated graphics, would be a satisfying experience.

Top 200 Games of All Time: By the Numbers

Top Years

Years with the most entries on the list

1. 22 games: 1998
2. 12 games: 1996
3. 10 games: 1994
4. 11 games: 1999
5. 9 games: 1993, 1997, 2000, 2008, 2010

And the years with just a single entry: 1983, 1985, 2020. 

I don't think this is surprising. I think many people consider 1998 to be one of the greatest years in gaming. 

It also happened to be the year I was getting paid decent money watching my brothers and I had unlimited time to play games. 

Top 200 Games of All Time: 3 - 1 - The Finale

3. Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim

• Year: 2011
• System: PC

Whhhaaaaa? This is is a dumbed down game for WOW players. Where's Morrowind? Where's Elder Scrolls Online? You noob ass noob.

Morrowind didn't even have a journal. Elder Scrolls Online, although constantly evolving, is still a gate checked online MMO game. 

Skyrim did what other Elder Scrolls could not, break into the mainstream. The release was a cultural phenomenon. 

Yeah, some systems were streamlined and dumbed down, but this isn't a bad thing. To evolve, Elder Scrolls had to, and it paid off. 

I've put in somewhere around 180 hours on PC, another 40 hours on PS4, 5 hours in VR, and 80 hours

on Switch. And I'm not sick of it yet. I stare at the icon on my Switch all the time thinking about traversing the world again. 

Skyrim served a smorgashboard of giving you varying areas, call backs to older Elder Scrolls games, fresh new ideas, interesting dungeons, and political intrigue. 

And you know what? If Skyrim gets released again on PS5, I bet you'll buy it. 

Top 200 Games of All Time: 10 - 4

10: Age of Empires 2

• Year: 1999
• System: PC

Age of Empires 2 is the absolute peak of the real time strategy genre. All dozen or so kingdoms were balanced. You could win with the British or the Japanese or the Byzantines. It played like a fighting game, where you needed to learn what made your empire strong. 

And the buildings had scale. Traditionally, RTS buildings would take up roughly 4 squares to your characters 1 square. Well Age of Empires 2 had giant castles. Although not true scale, they made the game feel so much more realistic. 

There was nothing more satisfying than rolling up on an enemy with a half dozen Trebuchets or put in the cheat code and roll in with a missile firing Shelby Cobra. 

Top 200 Games of All Time: 20 - 11

20: Tomb Raider 2

• Year: 1997
• System: PS1

The first dungeon of Tomb Raider 2 has the best string of Indiana Jones-esque traps. Slide down the steep embankment, flip over the spikes, grasp the zip line, and land near a campfire. Wait? A campfire? In the back of this tomb? 

Yeah, Tomb Raider 2 did everything bigger. You're not killing as much innocent wild life. Instead, you're going after Mafia types in Italy, Antarctica, caves. Lara's mansion is opened up a little more and has plenty of secrets. You rode a damn snow mobile, a boat. Lara got vehicles for Christ sake. And you fight a god damned dragon for the finale. 

Tomb Raider 2 took the great concept of the first, but fixed many of the problems of the first. 

19: Star Craft

• Year: 1998
• System: PC

The ultimate rock paper scissor game. Star Craft hit a perfect balance between the three factions. 

Zerg allowed you to cheaply and quickly throw masses of weak creatures at your enemy, creating the term Zerg rush and forever changing a strategy in all RTS games. The Protoss cost a ton of money, but gave us "you must construct additional pylons." And then you had the Terran, which ended up defining the look of the space marine in everything Sci-fi for the next two decades. 

Star Craft is still played competitively 20 years later for a reason. There's not been many RTS games that have come close to the king. 

18: Resident Evil: REmake

• Year: 2002
• System: GameCube

It was sort of insane that Capcom did a from the ground up remake of the original Resident Evil, less than 10 years after it came out. But here we are, and it's a piece of history. 

There weren't many remakes at this point. Metal Gear Solid is sort of a spiritual remake of the NES games, but other than that, I can't think of any. 

And instead of just rebuilding the same game, but higher resolution, they redesigned the mansion to make more sense. They recorded new lines of dialogue. All the puzzles were changed. The game still looks good today, partially because of the tricks they did like model the candle light so that it still reflects off the walls.  

I've memorized basically every Resident Evil game to the point where I can do an almost no gun shot Resident Evil 2 run, but there's something about the twisting corridors of the mansion that still keeps the fog of war in my mind. 

17: Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater

• Year: 2005
• System: PS2

Metal Gear Solid 3 is a perfect James Bond game. Out of control super villains, some of the best of the

series. (Sniper battle with the old man, the flame throwing Cosmonaut, Bee guy, your fucking mentor)

It has the perfect music queues, even having a parody of the James Bond title sequence song while you climbed a 400 foot ladder. 

Yes, the camo system and the heal system are too many menus deep, but you forget about that because you are playing on a canvas. This game is art. 

You may have noticed by now that when a game is able to make me cry, it generally gets on this list. I cry every single time the credits roll on MGS3. Metal Gear Solid 3 has the best ending to any game ever made. 

I can't wait for Konami to package up all the Metal Gears again, so I can buy a Metal Gear collection for the sixth time. 

16: Condemned: Criminal Origins

• Year: 2005
• System: Xbox 360

Condemned: Criminal Origins was not on my radar. I don't even remember how I ended up with it. Probably some sale or something. 

Condemned is the greatest hits of horror. An abandoned department store filled with creepy mannequins. You've got the school at night time. And a god damned library from hell. 

Condemned is one of the scariest games I've ever played. It's one of the most intense thrillers I've ever played. Condemned belongs in the True Detective universe and would be widely regarded as the best season. All around, Condemned is a complete melding of genres. It makes you feel as if you're playing a true crime story. 

15: Diablo

• Year: 1997
• System: PC

I used to have a Christmas tradition. We would spend all day at my grandma's house, followed by my

aunt's house, just generally having to interact with way too many people. 

We would come home and all I would want to do was have some quiet and listen to some music. I've always been very excited about Christmas and unable to sleep, so I knew I would end up staying awake most of the night anyway. 

I would turn the 24 hour Christmas Story marathon on, boot up Diablo, and do a run and see how far I could get. 

Sure Diablo 2 is a better game, Darkstone may have some life improvements, but Diablo 1 has the memories. 

14: Demon's Souls

• Year: 2009
• System: PS3

This is one of the few unestablished franchises that I preordered a game based off a trailer. I don't know what it was about this trailer, but I felt like this was going to be big. Not only that, but I never buy deluxe editions, but I did that too. 

And sure enough, Demon's Souls hit. (Maybe not as hard as Dark Souls) It was addictive to try to figure out how to get a better run. Fight your way back to the Tower Knight over and over again, only to get crushed over and over again. And when you just didn't have enough poison resistance, you could escape the poisoned swamp and go level up in the magic prison world instead. 

I'm glad we're going to get an HD remaster. This is still my favorite Souls game and I can't wait to play through it again. 

I sold my Deluxe Edition of Demon's Souls a few years later for $220. (Not bad for $80 purchase) and it funded me buying my jungle green Metal Gear Solid PSP. 

13: Deus Ex: Human Revolution

• Year: 2011
• System: PC

I didn't understand Deus Ex in the late 90s. I was still in the mindset that FPSs were run and gun, dodge

and hodge (?). I didn't know there was this thinking man's shooter. 

So when Deus Ex was rebooted with Human Revolution, it was a life affirming game. You can play Deus Ex guns a blazing, sneaking around, being charismatic as hell. There's even an achievement for beating the game without killing anyone. 

It's one of those games where you can see an alternate path and get frustrated because you don't have the perk to use it. 

The sequel was a little tone deaf and probably killed another game in the current series, but I'm hoping that Square will give the franchise another chance on the next generation. 

12: Duke Nukem 3D

• Year: 1996
• System: PC

Duke Nukem 3D was a refreshing pallet swap of Doom. While everything in Doom had sort of the same dark colors of the moon base, Duke Nukem 3D had brightly colored cities, apartments, and even a moon base. 

On top of that, the humor was perfect for 12 year old me. You could see pixelated boobies on the strippers. You could hear Duke quip sexual innuendos. I thought Duke Nukem was so cool, I actually wrote three Duke Nukem comic books. 

I had Duke fever so hard, I also learned how to setup a LAN so I could play deathmatches against my brothers in our house. I even got into the mod scene and figured out how to swap out map files to essentially have unlimited Duke Nukem. 

11: Final Fantasy IV

• Year: 1991
• System: SNES

Final Fantasy IV (North America) was the first time I felt like 2D sprites could convey real emotion.

You felt the hit when the twins sacrificed themselves. You wanted to rise to be a Paladin. 

And the sprites, look at that beautiful bastard next to this. That's a damn good looking sprite. 

Final Fantasy IV was the first time I felt games could be more than just a simple platformer or a simple sports game or a simple racing game.  If was the introduction to a lot of the Final Fantasy menu styles, job types, even names that are still used in Final Fantasy games. 

Final Fantasy IV still holds up as an epic adventure in some medieval setting. If you play a ROM, be sure not to save scum like your boy did. You may just save yourself in a dungeon you can't survive. 

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Top 200 Games of All Time: 30 - 21

30: Amnesia: The Dark Descent

• Year: 2010
• System: PC

I don't know if I've played a game that has gotten me as worked up as Amnesia: The Dark Descent. The only weapon you have is light and that light is at a premium. 

You don't know why you wake up in a giant castle. And at first, you don't really know there's an evil lurking underneath. That is until the first time your torch blows out and all of a sudden, there's something going bump in the night. 

And you dig deeper into the catacombs, you come across the water monster, one of the scariest scenes in games ever. My heart was in my throat the entire time. Eventually you make your way to the dungeon where things get more and more tense. 

Top 200 Games of All Time: 40 - 31

40: Legend of Legaia

• Year: 1998
• System: PS1

JRPGs were coming out left and right. There was a seemingly endless stream of money for the JRPG subgenre. Hell, Square Enix alone could keep you busy for years. 

Legend of Legaia changed the formula a little. Instead of completely battling via menus, Legend of Legaia had this fun combo system. You would build up a spirit bar and then string together a combo pressing a direction representing each arm and leg. And if you choose a specific combo, it would do extra damage. 

The story is a classic, "young boy in a village must save the world cause some otherworldly force bonded to him." And you run into the sheltered girl and the combat monk guy and god on an adventure resurrecting these magical trees that hold back the evil. The sound track is great, the color pallet really beautiful and bright, and it doesn't overstay it's welcome like other games.  

Top 200 Games of All Time: 50 - 41

50: Hunter Hunted

• Year: 1996
• System: PC

Hunter Hunted is a game that I only know of about four people ever hearing of and less ever playing it. But it's a fantastic platforming adventure game that takes place in the post-apocalypse. 

Aliens have enslaved humans and these Minotaur looking creatures and make them fight for entertainment. You control Jake or Garethe Den (I'll let you figure out which one is the Minotaur) and work together trying to rebuild a car to escape the aliens. 

Every level has objectives and exits you must find. And the best part of the game is there are 20 or so co-op levels where you and a friend can play split screen and try to reach the objectives together. 

I still have a disk copy of Hunter Hunted, but in a terrible Twilight Zone like episode, no disk drive to be found. I check GOG, Steam, and the Epic Game Store at least a few time a year waiting to see if this gets added to the library. 

Top 200 Games of All Time: 60 - 51

60: Wario's Woods

• Year: 1994
• System: NES

I bought Wario's Woods on a lark. I went into this awesome retro place (that unfortunately didn't last long) and just asked them if they had any games that were like Mario or Mega Man. 

The clerk sort of shrugged and suggested Wario's Woods, Yoshi's Cookies, or Bionic Commando. 

Bionic Commando was a solid recommendation, but the only thing Wario's Woods and Yoshi's Cookies had in common was Mario characters. And in my opinion, Yoshi's Cookies kinda sucks. 

Wario's Woods is my favorite puzzle game of all time. You stack different... I don't even know what the hell they are... woodland creatures? Trying to get a certain amount in a row. Some of them require diagonal matches, some require two clears, some require two quick clears, all while Wario sits at the top of the screen crunching the play area. 

Top 200 Games of All Time: 70 - 61

70: Darkstone

• Year: 1999
• System: PC

Darkstone is more or less a Diablo rip off. But like a really good Diablo rip off?

It fed my need for more Diablo. But it also filled a sort of general need for a role playing game. There wasn't this overarching hell is spilling into the world. There were fully populated villages to interact with. 

There of course were randomized dungeons. Dozens of enemies and spells and weapons. 

Darkstone wasn't better than Diablo, but in a time where Diablo clones were everywhere, Darkstone stood above the rest. 

Top 200 Games of All Time: 80 - 71

80: Warlords II

• Year: 1993
• System: PC

I didn't understand Warlords II for a long time. I had the Shareware version, so a lot of maps and characters were locked and if you clicked on them, you would get the "send a check or money order to this address." But I kept at it because what else was I going to do. I was getting like $5 in allowance, I couldn't exactly afford games. I survived mostly on shareware.

I'd play until inevitably, I would run out of units and die. I couldn't figure out how I was expected to win because the instructions were so obtuse. 

And then I discovered Gamefaqs. 

And then I started realizing checking out the ruins would get you treasure and maybe allies. And then I figured out how to make more units. And eventually I got really good at the game. 

Top 200 Games of All Time: 90 - 81

90: Dead Rising 4

• Year: 2016
• System: Xbox One

Dead Rising 2 and 3 sort of leaned into more mainstream story telling and video gaming. They lost a little of that weird from Dead Rising 1. 

It's a miracle that Dead Rising 4 exists at all. The game was almost finished when they decided to basically scrap it and start over. Not only does it exist, but Dead Rising 4 recaptures that weird from the original perfectly and is able to give you the greatest hits of the good things from DR2 and DR3. 

You start in a mall, which is better designed than the mall in the first one. Weapons crafting sort of took away from DR2, but DR4 finds a way to make it fun. You move through a military encampment, which then opens out into a full realized town, which is better than DR3. There's plenty of opportunity to drive over zombies, make wacky weapons, take the story seriously, or just mess around for a few hours. 

Top 200 Games of All Time: 100-91

100: Zack and Wiki: The Quest for Barbaros' Treasure

• Year: 2007
• System: Wii

There were less than 5 games on the Wii that actually used the waggle for good. Zack and Wiki was the second best of those five after Wii Sports. 

Zack and Wiki was an interesting puzzle game. You would be introduced to a situation such as your plane crashing and you jumping out and having to find a way to slow your decent. Or a volcano with a locked door. And using the Wiimote, you would have to open an umbrella to slow your fall or grab a key and actually use it to unlock a door. 

This game does what most of those phone game advertisements promise. There's an order of operations to solve the puzzles and when you do it, it's incredibly satisfying. 

Top 200 Games of All Time: 110-101

110: NBA Jam

• Year: 1993
• System: Genesis

Tournament Edition was probably a better game, but I have better memories around the original NBA Jam. We were not a basketball family, but for some reason, this was one of the first games we got for our Genesis. 

I loved putting in codes to play as Bill Clinton. I loved keeping my on fire streak alive for five minutes against the CPU. And even though the Chicago Bulls were pretty much most over-powered team in the game, you could still put together a great defense against them.

And nothing felt better than hitting a 3 pt buzzer beater. 

I loved watching my brother jumping for the reset button at the end of a match to try and save his record from an embarrassing loss being added. 

Top 200 Games of All Time: 120-111

120: XCOM: Enemy Unknown

• Year: 2014
• System: PC

X-COM is a frustrating game in that it gives you the odds to hit. And there's something in your dumb caveman brain that makes you think, "ohh, 60% chance to hit. That's definitely going to hit." And then when the dice roll doesn't go your way, you have to quickly adjust and prepare to get pummeled the next turn. 

X-COM is hard, as it should be. This is a strategy game. You're supposed to fail sometimes, readjust, and come back at it. 

X-COM 2 didn't live up to the first game, instead opting to spike the difficulty in ways that I don't think are fair. Too often are you flanked by unmarked enemies, and your squad immediately gunned down. But X-COM 1 felt mostly fair. Thee enemy ambushes came where you expected them to. 

Top 200 Games of All Time: 130-121

130: Streets of Rage 2

• Year: 1993
• System: Genesis

Streets of Rage 2 is what all beat-em-ups strive to be. An attainable win. Tough. Tons of style. That awesome 1980's movie-punk character design. Smooth frame rate. Variety of moves. And I think ultimately the most important part of a side scrolling beat-em-up, great couch co-op. 

Streets of Rage 2 really kicked off a lot of the 90s attitude. You had some American Gladiator-ass names like Stone and Blaze and Max Thunder. You had a playable character on roller blades. The entire city seemed to be made of brick held together by graffiti and hilariously translated signs like "It's Like Boo" and "Do! Baseball."

Top 200 Games of All Time: 140-131

140: Liero

• Year: 1998
• System: PC

I always liked Worms, but it always felt a little slow. Especially when playing against the AI where you would have to wait long periods of time for them to make a move. 

Liero solves that problem. Gone are the back and forth of turns, instead, we play for keeps. This is Worms: the Death Match. 

You move quickly through the underground tunnels, using grappling hooks, and firing wildly, cutting through the mud. Sometimes you might just carpet bomb downwind from you, hoping you'll get a lucky bounce of the trenches you were building. 

Liero was a free download I found when I was looking for a copy of Worms on the internet, and it ended up being a blast to play against my friends. 

The Top 200 Games of All Time: 150 - 141

See games

• 200-191
• 190-181
• 180-171
• 170-161
• 160-151

150: Grand Theft Auto IV

• Year: 2008
• System: Xbox 360

Grand Theft Auto never really sunk in for me. I hated driving, I hated gun fights, I hated racing, I hated staying fit, getting hair cuts, driving across town, getting murdered by the dumb physics, driving across the neighborhood, the final missions, and driving in general. 

I sort of lucked into Grand Theft Auto IV. I was grocery shopping at a Wal Mart around midnight and saw the huge line. I sort of thought, what the hell, let's see if they still have a copy. Well, the ended up splitting the line to open another register and guess who was second all of a sudden? This guy. 

I took it home and let it download all night long. And when I got home from work the next day, I started my journey. 

Don't get me wrong, I still hated the driving and the gun play was still bad, but I liked the characters. I wanted to see what the game had to offer. I saw it through and generally enjoyed it. There was still one of those classic annoying Grand Theft Auto final missions where you're driving while shooting, my two least favorite things combined into one 20 minute mission. 

Where I got the most out of this game though is the sandbox online mode. My two friends and I would load up, get weapons, and then choose where we were going to dig in and see how long we could outlast the cops. 

149: Dragon Quest Builders 2

• Year: 2018
• System: Switch

This is going to be the most shameful thing I say in this entire project, but I've never played Minecraft. 

I skipped out on it when it first came out because I wasn't doing much computer gaming at the time. And then by the time it was available on consoles, Notch turned out to be a terrible person. 

But I get it. Dragon Quest Builders 2 is an absolute delight. The towns people give you a request (build a bathhouse, build a barn) and as you fulfill their requests, the town gets larger and you get more tools. I spent way too much time in the second village area building and building and un-necessary building. 

If I had one complaint, it's that the combat gets in the way of my fun. I think you could completely remove that aspect and the game would be better for it. 

148: Army Men 3D

• Year: 1999
• System: PS1

This is the best Toy Story game ever made. No, it's not a licensed Toy Story product, but you played as the little green army men against the tan army men. Most of the game takes place in what seem like real battle fields, but then the tan army gets a hold of a weapon that can harness the sun's power and melt the green army. 

This game advertised to kids had a vast array of kind of complicated missions. You might need to sweep a mine field, or sneak on your belly into an enemy encampment, or drive a tank through an entire battalion of tan soldiers. 

The best part was the split screen two player deathmatch mode. One day in a particularly hard fought battle with my brother, I accidentally found a secret path up a mountain and outside of the map. But it was designed out. It wasn't like I clipped through the map where I wasn't supposed to be. There was a mortar up there and a Tinker Toy. When I picked up the Tinker Toy, it flashed "key." I spent the next year in a web ring with a dozen other enthusiasts trying to uncover what the keys do. We found two other keys in the multiplayer levels, but never figured out what they did. 

Finally, I got the idea to just email 3DO and a few days later, I got something from one of the devs. He basically said the keys don't do anything, they just thought it would be a fun Easter Egg. 

147: Jackal 

• Year: 1986
• System: NES 

Jackal was inspired by 1980s love affair of everything American military was cool. Drive a jeep around

with your buddy firing machine guns and grenades at everything. 

Your objective is to clear the enemy out of maps while rescuing POWs. This was actually the part I enjoyed the most, you could blow a hole in the side of a building and between 1-5 POWs would jump into your jeep. Then at the halfway point and end point of the mission a helicopter would land and allow you to unload your crew while dodging rockets coming from tanks and foot soldiers.

The immediate thing you'll notice is the striking color pallet. Your army green jeep is dropped from an airplane onto bright orange desert. 

In some ways this was a more intelligent 1942. The enemies felt like they were real people in Jackal instead of just swarms driving face first into your guns. 

146: Zork: Grand Inquisitor

• Year: 1997
• System: PC

There was an 8 year period, where if you were going to release a PC game, it was either a flight simulator (Tie Fighter), a point-and-click adventure (Maniac Mansion), or a graphic adventure puzzle game (Myst). Zork fell in that last category, except unlike Myst, it didn't take itself seriously. 

Zork is basically Harry Potter meets Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It's an entire world where magic and wizards exist in a sort of modern sense. The jokes all poke fun at how stupid everything is. 

It did have one thing in common with Myst, some of the puzzles were impossible without just trying every object on every object. I would've never gotten through this game without Gamefaqs. 

145: The Unholy War

• Year: 1998
• System: PS1

The Unholy War was a surprise. When I was broke as can be, I would buy used PlayStation 1 games

from Blockbuster. I had only seen advertisements for the Unholy War, but I couldn't really understand what it was. It sort of looked like a third person fighting game with monsters, but maybe it had some real time strategy elements?

And the answer is yes. It was a board game, where you could spawn more troops if you managed resources properly. And when you rode up on an enemy, the game would turn into a fighting game between the two chess pieces. 

This was one of the best two player games on the PlayStation. A game that flew under mosts radar, but should have been held up as one of the top games for the platform. 

144: Bust-a-Move 4

• Year: 1998
• System: PS1

There's two ways to have your match color/shape puzzle games. The ones like Tetris and Dr. Mario where the pieces drop at you or the ones where you shoot a piece at the board, like Bust-a-Move. 

I always preferred the Bust-a-Move style games. I felt like my brain handled the anxiety better and I was able to see patterns and combos easier. 

Bust-a-Move features our favorite dinosaurs, Bubble and Bobble, firing colored orbs toward the top of the screen, trying to knock like colors down. I played this for hours on the PS1. It was an addiction. 

143: Borderlands

• Year: 2009
• System: Xbox 360

Diablo, but a first person shooter, with humor, a cool art style, and split screen co-op? Unheard of in the

modern era. I thought couch co-op was dead. There were too many nights where a buddy and I would sit on the couch, intention just to have a beer before going out, and just scrapping out plans and getting Borderlands drunk together. 

The excitement of the random stat die everytime you picked up a weapon. Wanting to know what psychopathic boss was waiting around the corner. Desperately trying to sprint from the spawn point before you partner died. Untouchable fun for games at the time. 

142: Sid Meier's Civilization VI

• Year: 2016
• System: Switch

I'm a strategy fiend. I've been waiting for something to come to a portable system forever. Civilization was teased on the Vita, but ultimately we got a phone game port. 

Civ VI works better than it has any right to be. The switch controls are incredibly intuitive for a game that usually you are shortcutting your way around a keyboard on. 

This is a classic, "One more turn" game. You start counting your moves until the next upgrade is finished. And when the enemy is at your gates, you have to decide to finish out other upgrades or immediately throw every military unit you can crank out at the threat. 

141: Gladiator 

• Year: 1995
• System: PC

The wild west of the shareware period of PC gaming had me playing some really weird shit that a dude

in his basement programmed. I spent hours downloading a single 500 KB game from "FreeGamedemos.com." 

Most of those games were crap and I would end up deleting them immediately, trying not to think too much of the wasted modem time. 

Gladiator by Forgotten Sages was one of those rare winners. You had a budget and could build out a team of adventurers to fight an enemy army. It was four player co-op, and my two brothers and I would crowd around a keyboard, trying to get at the 9 buttons we needed to move and attack. 

Gladiator is available on the Internet Archive to play. However, the pre-WASD keyboard mapping strikes again. It's basically unplayable because Esc is used so often, which is also the key to exit the emulator. 

Top 200 Games of All Time: 160-151

See games

• 200 - 191
• 190 - 181
• 180-171
• 170-161

160: Assassin's Creed: Black Flag

• Year: 2013
• System: PS4

Assassin's Creed 3 sucked. It didn't have any flow to the game. The forest and tree jumping didn't replace the feel of parkoring through a city. 

On top of that, the story was pretty lame. And besides a few missions (like running through a Revolutionary War battle), I don't remember a damn thing about the game. 

So when Assassin's Creed: Blackflag was announced, I wasn't convinced. Luckily for Ubisoft, what the hell else was I going to play on my new PlayStation 4?

The ship battles were a blast, the small piece meal islands everywhere gave you unique scenarios you couldn't just run from, and the story both in the pirate world and in the modern world was fun.

The ACII trilogy left a lot of really interesting story lines open, ACIII took itself too seriously and killed the momentum of some of those storylines. Blackflag took it in another direction and just got so meta-snake-eats-tail-way, that it was great. 

An evil gaming company has figured out how to generate games based off the memories of former assassin's. And then the plot starts unraveling nefarious happenings at the fake Ubisoft. 

159: Urban Strike

• Year: 1992
• System: Genesis

The "strike" series was a staple of the 16 bit era, coming to a culmination with the fifth generation's

Nuclear Strike. Even though there were two Strike's on the newer consoles, the 4th generation's Urban Strike is the peak of the series. 

You flew a helicopter with limited fuel and limited ammo (you could pick up more) and you would get various missions. You may need to steal giant mirrors from the bad guys, rescue a plastic surgeon who did work for the cult leader, or blow up an oil rig. 

As a kid, this game just seemed limitless. (Checking a YouTube walkthrough, I realize now it can be beat in under 3 hours pretty easily) You could choose between a few different choppers. There were missions where you would drive a tank or run around on foot. 

For Urban Strike, there was some Bond villain like cult leader that you were trying to stop. The cult leader ran for president and lost the 2000 election, ultimately forming a coup of some sort. 

158: Fighting Force

• Year: 1997
• System: PS1

Anyone with a PlayStation 1 had this demo. It came with your PlayStation, it came with magazine demos, it came with any Eidos demo disks. And because you had this demo, you played the parking lot area in front of the evil headquarters or Dr. Zeng hundreds of times.

Somewhere around the 70th time, you realized there was a bazooka hidden in the trunk of one of the cars. Which in turn had you playing another 70 times trying to figure out what else was hidden. 

I bought this game eventually and it became a co-op go-to. Each of the four characters had different stats and a different special move. The frame rate stayed up, the combat was varied and challenging, and the interactivity of the environments kept things interesting. This is the last beat-em-up game to get it's hooks into me. 

157: Contra 3: The Alien Wars

• Year: 1992
• System: SNES

My cousin got a SNES three years before I had a Sega. I was still stuck on the NES. So when he invited

me to spend the night and fired up the Super NES for the first time, my jaw hit the floor. The colors were so vivid, the sprites so detailed, and in the case of Contra 3, you saw what Mode 7 could do. 

We launched into the first game, the background seemed to move independently of the foreground. Enemies attacked from all sides. Power-ups flew overhead. But your brain couldn't put everything together because your finger was on the machine gun and jumps buttons constantly. 

And in the Contra tradition, mission 2 was from a completely different perspective. Instead of the long shooting gallery we know from the first game, we instead had a top down perspective that became popular in the PlayStation era with games like Loaded. 

And then in mission three, you're flying through the air, jumping from exploded piece of city to exploded piece of building. And then there was the patented 90s motorcycle level. And incredibly varied boss fights. 

Contra 3 is the best of the series. 

156: Perfect Dark

• Year: 2000
• System: N64

The missions were better than Goldeneye. The designs much cooler. The weapons much more interesting. And you could play the entire story in Co-op mode. Perfect Dark was such an interesting game. 

There were definitely downfalls. Requiring the expansion pack to give the RAM a boost was a huge bummer and extra cost. In fact, when I rented this from Blockbuster the first time, they didn't tell me about the expansion pack and I lost a day of rental. 

And then there's the other downfall. The multiplayer had the standard death match, but there were also something like 100 scenarios you could play through co-op. The issue is, every time you added another player, the frame rate was cut by 3/4. So if you dared trying to get four people into a game, expect every flick of the joystick to freeze your screen right before jerking your gun 110 degrees. 

Perfect Dark HD fixed some of these issues. The game didn't age well, especially the N64 control scheme, but there were few other games (until Halo) pulling off the technical feats Perfect Dark did. 

155: Pocket Bomberman

• Year: 1998
• System: Game-boy Color

I've always enjoyed playing the various Bomberman games against my friends. There's a tenseness with

trying to move quickly, think quickly, without trapping yourself between a bomb and a wall. 

Pocket Bomberman took the top down perspective and flipped the same sort of game play into a platformer. There was a cat and mouse game of trying to plant bombs to take out the enemies, without taking out yourself. Sometimes the timing was frustrating as you barely warmed the mid-section of an enemy and other times you found yourself standing next to a bomb without much you could do. 

154: Syndicate Plus

• Year: 1994
• System: PC

Syndicate was my first introduction to the corporation owned future dystopia. Corporations grew more powerful until they replaced the world governments. People lived in squalor. The corporations came up with a chip they could insert into a human that numbed their perception of the world. This of course lease to cyber enhancements and advertising directly to the brain. 

You could choose to either play as the corporation or as the rebellion. Essentially you lead a group of four cyborg soldiers in missions meant to stabilize regions and gain control for your corporation. But this wasn't just corporate espionage and buy outs (there was a little of that), these corporations have no qualms about carrying out assassinations and bomb detonations to meet their quarterly goals. 

153: Super Mario Maker

• Year: 2015
• System: Wii-U

This was the first Mario game since Galaxy to capture that childlike wonder in me again. I could load

up a level in any Mario style I wanted and had an unlimited treasure chest of them. 

Sure, many of the user generated content wasn't great, but I was amazed that there was this universal language of Mario where I could hop in, understand the intent behind the designer, and then see a Japanese or French flag next to their name. 

Mario is Mario is Mario. It's a unifier. 

And then when I finally went into the build tools, I was almost overwhelmed at all the ideas, the creativity that flowed through my brain. I was instantly the 5-year-old, cross-legged on the floor, drawing Mario levels on graph paper. 

152: Resident Evil

• Year: 1996
• System: PS1 

I didn't know how much I needed survival horror in my life. I was definitely too young to understand this game when I first played it. The puzzles were a little over my head, (I spent dozens of minutes trying to figure out how to equip the Emblem as a shield) but the moment I figured out you could push the statue over the railing and get a key, I was hooked. 

My cousin and I did a controller pass, examining every item, and looking for a hint. We were always low on ammo (on account of killing everything in every room) and ink ribbons. Eventually I found Gamefaqs, printed out a walk through, and we made it through. (Although, we were out of ink ribbons at the end of the game and had to play the final 30 minutes over and over again until finally beating it)

I've bought this game in every form it's existed in. The Director's Cut (with a much worse soundtrack, but interesting "Arrange" mode), the DS post with some new touch screen sequences, and of course the remake. 

151: Die Hard Trilogy

• Year: 1996
• System: PS1

Die Hard Trilogy is three good games in one. 

There was the third person shooter that covered the first movie's plot as you scaled Nakatomi Plaza. 

There was the incredible light gun game that covered most of the plot to Die Hard 2. 

And then there was the incredible predecessor to Crazy Taxi, where you drove a taxi to grab bombs in time that covered the plot of 3. 

Die Hard trilogy was one of the most complete games ever made for the PlayStation 1. It's unfortunate that the sequel was lackluster because I would've loved to see what other John McClain adventures they could come up with. 

Top 200 Games of All Time: 170-161

See games

• 200 - 191
• 190 - 181
• 180-171

170: Shovel Knight

• 
  Year: 2014
• System: Vita

I didn't know I needed Shovel Knight when I finally played Shovel Knight. I had just come off of a marathon Persona 4: Golden play through and had played through Uncharted 4 and COD Advance Warfare on the PS4. I was sort of exhausted from big experiences. 

Then Shovel Knight won my heart. 

The levels and enemies were a perfect combo to feel challenging, but totally do-able. You have a sense that you did something special, but obviously the game is built to allow you to win. I'm not that great at platformers and I made it far in Shovel Knight. 

It captured the feel of a NES game without any of the frame rate issues, cartridge limitations, a Nintendo seal of approval. 

169: Sonic Spinball

• Year: 1993
  
• System: Genesis

The frame rate was dogshit. I just need to get that out of way. Like single frames per second. But it was the early days of the 16 bit consoles. This was a common occurrence. So you adapted. You learned that the top right of the Spinball board had too much going on and things would crawl. 

There was a ton to do in this game. Lot's of objectives to complete to unlock chaos emeralds and boss fights. 

This was one of the first games I had for the Genesis, so I grew a fondness for it because I didn't have anything else. Even today, I dream of a rerelease where they redo the phsycis and give us the pinball game we deserve. 

Microsoft introduced Space Cadet with Windows 95. This is the pinball game most people remember. But Sonic Spinball was there first, and bette.... well not better... but FIRST!

168: Guerrilla War

• 
  Year: 1987
• System: NES

Guerrilla War was one of those games that just sort of appeared in everyone's entertainment center during the NES reign. No one ever bought it, but everyone owned it somehow, and it was a go-to multiplayer game no matter which friend's house you went to. 

I owned both Ikari Warriors and Guerrilla War to fill my top-down co-op combat games library. Guerrilla War was vastly superior. 

Large sprites, the characters moved quickly, and it felt innovative. One thing that Ikari Warriors was missing was the map being used to actually create varied and interesting scenarios. GW would have you rush through a wide open jungle where you could maneuver around. Then you would reach a village that had houses to hide behind, but you also had to be careful because the enemy could spwan from behind them. You'd get pinched between two high walls with machine gun nests on top and would have to throw grenades while dodging. 

167: Gekido

• Year: 2000
  
• System: PS1

I honestly had too much money when I was 14. I was paid something like $60 a week to babysit my brothers, which meant every other week I would go to the mall and blow it all on video games and paraphernalia. And on one of those trips, I bought the flour player multitap for the PS1 thinking, "Finally, every brother can play at the same time." 

And then I had a multitap and no games. So I did an internet search, "Hey Jeeves, what are the PS1 games that support the use of this $40 thing I bought."

Gekido Urban Fighters was on the very short list and was only $30. So I bought it and was surprised to find it was a really fun brawler that had a chaotic fighting arena mode that was Powerstone before Powerstone was Powerstone. 

166: Cool Spot

• 
  Year: 1993
• System: SNES

I was a dumb kid. I never knew with the hands of well placed marketing were massaging my brain subtlety. McKids... collecting those golden arches and cheeseburgers... didn't put it together. 

Cool Spot... literally the logo for 7Up, jumping around in platforming action, collecting more 7Up logos, title screen has him surfing on a bottle of 7Up... yeah, didn't think about it. 

In a way, I'm sort of glad. This was actually a really fun platformer. It ditched the normally rigid right angles of the platforms and instead the definitely rigid right angles into what looked like hand drawn backgrounds. And you'd flip around, spitting what I now know is Sprite, at all your enemies. 

165: Diddy Kong Racing

• Year: 1997
  
• System: N64

Why the hell haven't we had another Diddy Kong Racing game? Seriously, you ask people about this game and they get a far off look in their eyes and a smirk. Is it rights issues with all of Rare's characters? Does Nintendo hold the rights to a game from a studio that is a Microsoft shop now? 

When you think of the third person games where you flew, it was this, Rogue Squadron, and Star Fox. The air races were great, they literally brought another dimension to the races we knew from Mariokart. 

And, probably it's greatest accomplishment, this was one of the few games where the N64 controller actually felt natural. 

164: Kagero: Deception II

• 
  Year: 1998
• System: PS1

This is such an unique premise to a game. Soldiers come to your castle to kill you, some sort of witch/demon. You passively kill them by setting traps around your castle and luring them into it. 

I was first introduced to Deception II via a PS1 demo disk. The demo allowed you to kill three enemies and you had access to four or so traps. 

There were so many ways to set the traps and lure the guys into them. And then I accidentally discovered combos when my swinging ceiling axe knocked a guy into an electric chair. I played the demo for hours but could never find a copy of the game in the wild. 

Then as a college kid, just casually strolling through a second hand shop in town, I found a copy for like $45. A hefty price for a game that was 7 years old at the time, but I bought it, and to my pleasure found that it was as fun as I remember. 

163: Castlevania

• Year: 1986
  
• System: NES

Castlevania seemed so cool in the 80s. To have an adventure that had branching paths and secrets everywhere was unheard of. I really loved Simon's Quest and didn't know which one to put on this list. It wasn't until I was an adult that I realized how unfair Simon's Quest was. 

I had all the time in the world to come up against obtuse puzzles and to whip every brick in every wall looking for a secret. 

I fell off this series hard. I don't have the patience for any Metroidvania game anymore, but there was a solid few years where I would blow into the Castlevania cartridge and play for hours. 

162: Super Mario World 3D

• 
  Year: 2013
• System: Wii-U

The Wii-U had some great games on it. It's just too bad the controller sucked and had to be within 10 feet of the console and collected fingerprints like crazy. 

Super Mario World 3D was one of the best Mario games since Galaxy. This was an obvious throw ideas on a white board game. Nintendo would introduce a new mechanic in a level... and then just throw that shit away for a new mechanic in the next level and the next level. 

And damn if I don't love running around in the cat suit. 

If the rumors are true and this is coming to Switch next year for the Mario anniversary, everyone should pick this up. The game has so much charm, so many interesting ideas, and it just really light hearted.

161: Demon Sword

• Year: 1989
• System: NES

By now you've probably seen a theme with NES games that I like. They are all fast. Games on the

Nintendo tended to be very stiff and slow movements. (Fester's Quest anyone)

Demon Sword was fast. You'd quickly jump from tree to tree at breakneck speeds, tossing ninja stars, swinging your sword, and eventually fighting a boss. 

The objective was to rebuild your broken sword. So you start the game with a blade about as large as your forearm. And as you collect pieces, this shit gets wild. You think Cloud's buster sword is huge, this thing can get to be like 3 times the size of your sprite. 

And as an added bonus, the American cover art was that semi-homoerotic late 80s like buff shirtless dude with a sword.